How to Get Promoted

Here's some of my learnings about getting promoted for those that really want to play that game:

- Only the perception of your work matters

- Attend the social events and get in good with the bosses

- The countability of your major achievements is important. Make the list long, too long to hold in the mind

- At the same time the gravitas of your best achievement is also important since that will be the soundbite that is shared about you behind your back

- Get allies who can proselytize about you behind your back

- Be the best. The difference between one and two is bigger than that between two and three, as far as promotions go

- Take credit for your work (use pronouns I and Me when talking about your work, not We) and do not allow others to take credit for your work

- If it's a teamwork situation with other people on your level, don't do most of the work, because the credit will end up being split 50/50 in the eyes of the bosses even if you did most of it

- Make a very good first impression

- Shape the narrative around the role you played in the success of the mission/team/company

- Get the bosses to make a soft public commitment regarding your competence

- Even if you have a really good boss, all of the above is still important, because they are fallible humans and aren't omniscient

- Actually do good work, it'll make the above easier

I watched my dad spend his career getting promoted into misery. He worked so hard to climb the ladder and was successful at it, but it took him too long to realize it was making him miserable. It got to the point where they were forcing him to take promotions by threatening to fire him. Eventually he called their bluff. He refused a promotion and was forced into early retirement.

I tend to advise people to at least consider not caring about getting promoted. Here on HN, most of us are lucky enough to be in an industry where you can provide a comfortable life for you and your family at a relatively low rung on the ladder. Once you get there, focus on making sure you don't go backwards and otherwise just coast and do whatever makes you happiest at the end of the day. If playing corporate games makes you happy then by all means focus on that, but if it doesn't then there's nothing wrong with refusing to play.

Not caring isn't right for everyone, but a lot of people just never consider it as an option. It's easy to get caught up in the rat race.

This is so depressing and cynical. And fairly accurate in a lot of cases.

The trick, if you don't want to debase yourself, is to find a manager who is good at all of these things, but is also good at passing credit down and blocking blame going up.

When things go well they will take credit for their great management and then highlight the IC who was responsible. When things go sideways, they will take the blame without naming names and then propose a 2 quarter solution to fix it.

These are a set of games which in general I think can cause tremendous frustration in the people that "don't get it" or aren't naturally socially outgoing, good corporate citizens by nature. This is a similar bucket as Win Friends and Influence People adherents - it's a methodology and an effective one, but there are parts to consider. You see this all the time in security. They're right, but because it's not packaged well, there are legions of bitter AF security engineers who don't understand why their messages aren't not getting through.

At a minimum, it's really important that people know that things can work like this sometimes. If you don't follow it and maintain your soul or whatever, at least you won't be confused why Brian shot up the ladder so quickly. Promotions and success shouldn't only go to the socially outgoing, which is why I don't think Win Friends and Influence People is all that bad of a book. In a well functioning team, Brian and the talented Roberta can also climb. But if you're really pissed about Brian, stuff like this is probably why he's doing well. At least you know!

If Roberta needs to learn to schmooze a bit by reading a book, or learn how to navigate a crappy team and save a career to fight another day by doing an 18 month jump as this article states, I think that's ok. We train our bodies and minds to try and even the odds in the job market and health context, so what's wrong with training our personalities and corporate strategies a bit so the good can rise up too?

The only caveat with this genre of corporate how-to'ing is it only works if you never mention that's what you're doing. That's sort of obvious, but it's an interesting quirk because this is important stuff to pick up on for good, talented, non-A-Hole peopl who do want to find a way to do good in existing corporate structure. But it's naturally sort of a toxic underbelly of work culture, and many are opposed to learning it.

> grow headcount faster than baseline

Lol I was on the floor with this one. It's funny because it's true. My super went from being my super to one level above skip, while I was trying so hard to get a measly raise/promotion after 4 years of dedicated work. It was always "This year, we are going to work on getting you ready to operate at the next level."

Want to get a promotion, just add the number of people you manage.

When I was 11 or 12, my father gave me a copy of “Parkinsons Law” (https://www.amazon.com/Parkinsons-Law-Pursuit-Progress-Busin...), explaining that this is the most important book on management I will ever read.

I found it super entertaining.

When I left Google in 2015 to go on sabbatical, I distributed 20 copies to various middle and upper-middle managers, mostly as friendly/jocular warning/admonishing.

When I returned in 2016, it seemed that one half had gotten the joke, and the other half had used it as a manual.

Either way: The linked article shows that the author has red-discovered Parkinson’s Law for himself.

(I recommend y’all read the book)

My experience in the US big city tech scene is that the best way to get promoted or given a raise is to simply get a new job every ~3 years.

This is super cynical and also kind of superficial from the perspective of an external observer.

Yes, the more competitive the company, the more competitive the people who are in it. Good companies harness that competitive energy to bring out the best work from its employees. Employees who are competitive also want to be surrounded by other competitive employees both to feed that competitive need and also to learn and push themselves further. A competitive person never wants to be bored.

Getting promoted is equivalent to influence. The higher up the ladder, the more influence one has, both from the top (closer to the decision makers) and the bottom (respect if IC, or mandate if a Manager).

You can only cheat your way up so high without earning that influence. Also, each level up the ladder requires a whole new set of strategies to make it to the level above that.

What I've seen in my career is that some of these so called "cheating" EMs, Directors and VPs got there during the early company because they were in the right place and right time to rise up quickly. However, they never last in that position for long. If they didn't have the genuine skill to become an influencer, after a few bad quarters, they will be asked to take the blame and lose their position. If they were acting in bad faith during their tenure and lost support from others they will also have a difficult time rising back up again.

I've found there are two really tough and visible dividing lines in a typical tech company: 1. the line between individual contributor (IC) and first level manager and 2. the line between the top managers and the executive class (directors, VPs, etc). These two lines define the three basic tech castes: ICs, managers and execs. While it's pretty straightforward to be promoted internally within these castes, it's difficult to jump from one to another, particularly from "normal manager" to "Director/VP". Thinking back to the last few companies I've worked, I'm having trouble remembering more than 1 or 2 director-and-above level people who actually started out as not-directors. Maybe the list of companies I've worked at is not representative, but in my view, execs tend to get hired as execs and don't promotion their way up to the title. So, following the "work hard - performance review - feedback" treadmill is great for climbing a small part of the ladder, it's not sufficient for making the big jumps that represent major career growth. Moving from caste to caste takes some different wizardry I haven't figured out yet...

This is going to sound a little touchy-feely, but I'm going to write it anyway.

There are a lot of games in the world, and what the author describes here is one of them. And you can play this game if you want to, and you might even win at it. But it's worth remembering that you have one existence, one set of time and energy to spend in this life. If you decide to look at the world this way, and operate with this mindset, then that's how you're choosing to spend it. You will not "make it" some day and suddenly reverse course.

More and more these days I think that people who are unhappy in the modern world live in prisons of their own making. Yes, a lot of people think this way and work this way. I think it's good to know the game is out there, and that you'll encounter people with this mindset. But you do not have to play the same game. Yes, you probably need a job. Yes, your material rewards might be lesser if you don't engage in this kind of stuff. But you can still live a perfectly good life—perhaps even a better life—by building it around other principles.

I don't mean this to be a lecture, or condescending, or anything other than a reminder that just because you have to work, it doesn't mean you're stuck playing the games other people are playing.

A lot of this blog post topics are expressed in the Gervais Principle, which is an amazing (and long) reading I strongly suggest to the candid souls [0].

However, I think the following is really original content, and worth citing:

> Today I'm working on a quarter that is going to happen in 2020. Not next quarter. Next quarter for all practical purposes is done already and it has probably been done for a couple of years. > > — Jeff Bezos, 2017

> The key to corporate opportunism is all there, in this quote. When a normal person reads it, he thinks "wow! Amazon is really thinking long term!" which is perhaps how Jeff intended it. But when an opportunist reads it, he thinks "wow! I can do anything I want for three years and it won't show up in the metrics!"

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

While there are kernels of uncomfortable truth in the article, I think there's at least equal parts begging the question.

"The kinds of opportunists who are attracted solely to wealth and status have no principles at all beyond accumulation of these two objects." Well, yes, by definition, but it's not clear that the definition is useful. Iff those people exist, that's how they'll act is used to not-so-subtly suggest that these people actually exist and they're taking "your" promotion unless you defend.

"I can do anything I want for three years and it won't show up in the metrics!" No, you can do anything you want and it won't show up in the SEC/Wall Street reported metrics, but you better believe Amazon has faster-acting internal metrics than that.

'"the codebase is such a mess this team can't ship anything until we spend three months refactoring" is really bad delivery. An opportunist would say "we need to work toward paying off the technical debt"' A pragmatist or realist would also say the same thing rather than demand an embargo on shipping features for three-months for what might be seen as (and might be) navel-gazing.

It's an enjoyable read, but in a similar vein as Harry Potter is an enjoyable read. Maybe it will provoke some thinking that's applicable to your work life, but it's more entertaining than educational, IMO.

This is The Prince of career advice: simultaneously accurate and evil, apparently written by someone who is aware of that fact.

Good god almighty this section of the article strikes close to home. Extremely accurate from the perspective of 3rd employee -> leaving at ~50 employees.

"At first, when you start working at a rapidly growing company, what you see is smart, idealistic, driven people working together to accomplish a goal greater than themselves. When you leave, unless you are willfully blind or exceptionally naive, what you see is a ruthless political arena— a modern day Game of Thrones, where machinations take place over email, and battles are won and lost over cups of light roast coffee."

I’m having the same reaction as many here - it’s ugly but often true.

BUT - if everyone followed this advice, I believe the org will fail eventually. Promotions aside, I think it takes enough people with real long term responsibility and care to actually keep things moving up and to the right.

So is there a less cynical framing here? Are there long term strategies to do good work and also get promoted? It might be harder (or less lazy) than jumping teams every 18 months and ignoring OKRs, but I’d like to hold on to some hope that we don’t have to secretly become a complete and total drain in order to succeed. I’ve done okay without stooping, and my current manager is a good counter-example IMO (though may be rare). Surely there are some ways to encourage true engagement over feigned work and to discourage leechy behavior?

> At first, when you start working at a rapidly growing company, what you see is smart, idealistic, driven people working together to accomplish a goal greater than themselves. When you leave, unless you are willfully blind or exceptionally naive, what you see is a ruthless political arena— a modern day Game of Thrones, where machinations take place over email, and battles are won and lost over cups of light roast coffee.

I grew with a rapidly growing company. While I don’t disagree with the author that these sorts of environments exist in our industry (or most industries), or even pockets inside of a company, I don’t think this experience describes mine. Maybe I’m willfully blind or naive (or maybe I was too low level to experience this), but I’d caution someone of taking this strategy wholesale and start assassinating the careers of your colleagues.

Keep in mind, a major goal of a company is to make money. The leader of the company is generally aligned with that goal. Those are their incentives. They hire people to make them more money. If you play a different game according to this quotation:

> So your job isn't to make good decisions to improve company metrics.

Then, if the leader is competent and they determine you’re doing this, you’re probably going to get fired. They might also be bad, and you might get promoted if you fool them. But you’re also probably fooling yourself if you also have the goal to grow your own skills.

Instead, I’d suggest this mindset: When you’re joining a company, you’re joining a group of humans who created a system to help them to work together. Each system is a bit different, tailored to the company and the people who compose them. Some are passable. Some are terrible. But there is variance, and you should probably think about the strategy you employ when you join a new company (or re-evaluate how you operate in your current one).

You don’t need to trust the system, but you do need to learn to see and work the system. I guess if the environment is truly toxic and your only goal is to get promoted, exploiting as the author suggests might be working the system. However, there are systems you can work in a more productive way that might end up making you feel more fulfilled.

What I personally realized and often told to people I mentored that consider the promotion ladder separate from your work and your career growth.

Most larger tech companies have some kind of leveling system. You should work with your manager to understand where you are currently and what are you lacking to move to the next level. Start doing those things (even if no-one asks you to do them) in a public way, document everything and share it with your manager. Managers generally want to promote their people but usually only 5-10% of the employees can get promoted in the cycle so they have to fight other managers for the promotions. So the better case you build for yourself, the easier it is for your manager to sell. I find the promotion game is easiest because you just need to do the required thing once to check the checkbox, and the quality of the outcome doesn't even matter much.

For career growth, think about what you want to do or be after this job in the company. Even if you plan to stay in the company, I find it better to think outside of the company, since you focus on things that are transferable, rather than company specific. You skills and general knowledge transfers, political alliances or knowledge of the particular codebase doesn't. For example if you consider being a founder, VP engineering, lead Swift engineer, then think about what kind of skills should you practice or people to know.

Then for work, try to find opportunities in the company to work projects that you actually are interested in, help your career growth or/and work with people you enjoy working with.

The problem what I saw is that people though promotion is some kind of automatic response if they just do their work well and ended up disappointed when it didn't happen. Ideally it would be like that but unfortunately in reality there are ~10 promotions available the cycle, and management has to choose who receives them. Or they would join project they didn't want to, hoping they would get promoted but in the end didn't because they were still lacking other things. Or work you might find interesting or important, might not be something that helps you get promoted. It's just easier think promotion ladder as a side metagame you need to play to win some prizes.

So career growth is about investing to the future, work is about being happy/fullfilled in the present and the promotions just increase your salary, and in some cases access to information and increase freedom choose projects you want to work on.

I think this title should be suffixed with "past the standard ceiling". And it's often quite cozy to stay below that ceiling, you can ignore most of the corpspeak and office-warfare and still prosper.

That's also where all the intellectually stimulating things happen, there's nothing of interest to a real hacker in upper management. There's only money and status there (and often lots of it), but no real puzzles.

The corporate management players know very well about the one thing they have to avoid - significant failure - thus they will never cross a truly competent person. Their entire career depends on it. Just make sure to push back from time to time to not take too much on your shoulders.

Haha, love this. There's a lot of truth in there for sure. I think some people definitely get promoted like that, while some others legitimately do so by being really good.

For me, the standing part though which I have observed is that: "An organization cannot commit suicide." In that sense, most companies have an accretion problem.

And what people don't realize is, that's true of your manager, their manager, and up all the way.

It would take someone external to put the breaks, which only happens if the company starts to do bad, then the shareholders expect change, and so a garbage collection takes place, and accretion starts again.

One thing that I wish was more obvious to me when I was starting my career on how to get promoted - work for a growing org in a growing company. If your company and org are stagnant or shrinking - there is likely a cap on how many people at certain levels they will support. And even if not, promotions will be slow due to budget.

related excellent ribbon farm articles:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

This piece does a nice job of narrating opportunism as a pathology. But I'm more interested in hearing about opportunism as a survival strategy. That is, when opportunism "wins" and becomes the default and not the abberation.

When the opportunist gets to the top (or is already at the top) and sets the rules to make themselves look good.

When the executives design the KPI's and OKRs around those rules to make their boss look good, themselves look good, and their org shuffle along.

When the directors begin adjusting their own internal metrics to focus on work that makes their boss look good, while at the same time, confusing their subordinates who assume those metrics reflect performance.

In that environment, I've seen the average mid-level manager seriously adopt the posture that article jokingly suggests. They have to for their own survival. If they're not opportunistic, they're out of a job. Their team is out of a job. Even if they know the metrics are misleading or false, or why the meetings don't matter, they're have to fight for attention, or else they risk losing vital resources for the team.

How cancer metastasizes across the organization's body and then becomes the body, would be a really interesting case study to read.

The only civilized way to get power and money is to have people with power and money want to give it to you.

Just give a shit, if you honestly care about what you work on and try hard it will take you very far.

Of course part of it comes down to luck, you have be working amongst decent people who can/will recognize good work. But on the whole I have found that just caring and trying hard will almost always take you where you want to go in a job.

> In summary, an opportunist's career advice is: ignore OKRs, switch > projects well before the consequences of your decisions can be > measured, act happy and easy-going, package bad news as appeals for > slow systemic adjustments, don't make anyone look bad, perform rituals > with enthusiasm, grow headcount faster than baseline, let work invent > itself, follow management fashions, avoid acute failures, believe this > sincerely.

I hate that's it's mostly true, but it is mostly true indeed.

Unfortunately if everyone follows this to the letter the company will most likely crash. Someone's gotta stand up and be accountable for their decisions, which means also MAKING the decisions. Making decisions is dangerous. The above is the recipe for never being accountable and always being on "the cool stuff".

"fewer opportunists in security"

We must work in radically different parts of security.

Not a lot of HN posts make me emotional, but this one did. I'm a middle-manager in a corporate, manage about a dozen teams (just to give you a sense). I want to say we don't have those practices in our company, but you know - I just don't know. I was promoted not because I played a better political game than someone else, but because I (think) I was the best for this job (got promoted instead of my own manager who left the company). I don't see other people playing the game but I could be blind to it. That's why this post made me _feel_ I might be missing on the game that's going on. However knowing my peers (same level as I am) I don't see them doing these things. I don't like this post.

Interesting thread and article. In life, doing good work is never enough. One also has to show good work to the appropriate audience.

Nikola Tesla, one the smartest men in the 20th centir toilednin obscurity until he spoke at the America Institute of Electricians event in 1888.

This article https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/cracking-the-who-you... explains the whole idea of showing your work to the right people

The point about metrics momentum is absolutely critical, and holds true even at larger, well-established companies like the one where I work.

A key piece of insight I am grateful to have had when I began my last job: people are really, really bad at removing bias from long term trends when evaluating individual performance. That means you should do two things:

1. Work on product areas where the overall key metrics are improving.

2. Never work on anything that is getting worse/being used less.

Anecdotally, all the best "climbers" I know do both of these very well.

This post is simply about values.

Everyone seeks status. It's one value. But some people have other values that partially or completely override it.

For example, as the post says, hackers value the quality of source code among other things.

And "opportunistic managers" don't secretly murder their rivals, whether or not it would improve the social standing. This is because of their values as well. (Psychopaths are actually weighing the risks and benefits of murder but they are a fringe.)

And tree cutters can also believe that well-cut trees are more important than social status. They would ridicule those who call meetings instead of attending the saw all day long.

All in all - everyone described in the post is optimally following the incentives present in the system. There is no need for contempt and no need to get cynical. In fact we should be quite happy about ignoring OKRs or performing the rituals with gusto.

I don't know about any inception that would allow to plant love for elegant code in a mind of a stranger. This stuff seems so intrinsic. I just pity these between the senior and the manager who struggle with their own conflicting worldviews for years, not even seeing the decision they actually face the whole time.

>Feigning sincerity in a convincing way is extremely difficult. So if you take any of this career advice, it's best to learn to candidly believe it.

At Google a large set of people seem generally upset that you have try hard to get promoted. There seems to be an idealism that the system should somehow drag the best people upward while they keep their focus on doing the best work.

Well yeah, that would be nice. But it's both impossible and useless! Promotion is a game, you can't win if you don't play. You do not have to be a ruthless opportunist, but you have to be willing to spend some of your time advocating for yourself and making some allies. Compensation (in money or status) is only used for retention so unfortunately many of the people who are not wiling to play the promo game are not willing to play the job market and therefore the company has no rational reason to increase their compensation.

The article is, imo, far too cynical about IC promotion. But it does have some good points about manager promotion. Manager incentives are very poorly aligned with good outcomes. An exceptional manager can get promoted without resorting to bad behavior but a mediocre manager has to do all of the things in the article (grow team too fast, steal credit, jump projects) to keep up.

This is the truth and also highly effective. But it is unfortunately the root of all evil of our industry - the quick obsolescence of everything, the low quality, the bad documentation and support, the regressions and bloat, the useless metrics and needless collection of personal data. You have every incentive to show something tangible every year and then abandon it, and zero incentive to maintain and polish it.

Why make it so complex and difficult? It's actually pretty easy.

The boss loves cycling? Hey, you do too! Why don't you go cycling together. Oh it's golf? You love it! Why don't you listen to everything that's going right and wrong at the firm.

I feel a bit sorry for the author of this article, because he thinks he figured it all out, and he's still going to lose from the guy who hangs out with the boss.

There is a lot of truth here but it's not universally true, it depends on where you work and who you work for.

Two teams in the same building, same dept. can be night and day different.

The longer people hang around, the less of this is possible.

I saw a lot of this at a fast growing company that got 'very huge' and then failed, partly due to this reason, I have so little respect for CEO's that promote hustlers.

Seems like a condensed version of The Gervais Principle:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

This should be required reading for anyone entering corporate America.

Brutal. My experience has been that people who do good work and take performance reviews seriously advance just fine. I can count on 2 fingers the number of times in my 23 year sales career that someone was promoted because of reasons unrelated to performance, and both times it was the same loser who was drinking buddies with the VP of Sales.

I've got too much of impostor syndrome + introversion to get promoted; for me at this point, a promotion would mean moving to a management position (e.g. scrum master, project manager, architect, CTO, roles like that), but they all involve managing and interacting with people a lot more and I'm not very comfortable with that. I'm afraid I'd get full of myself and pissy at people, bossy, etc.

At least I'm not the only one; the other day, instead of asking me if I could work on tasks in a project that shouldn't be my primary focus (in my perception), I got a call from the CEO of the company asking me the same thing instead. Why my colleagues wouldn't just ask me directly? I dunno. Why none of them stood up to take charge of the project in the role of a project manager? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also this is another reason why we need UBI or other policies to shink the workforce / total person-hours.

While the opportunists leverage the system, their insatiable desire for more headcount makes actual automation and the defeat of drudgery nigh impossible.

Well, I guess I'll have to not be promoted, them.

(And, as a software engineer, still earn about two or three times the average pay of a school teacher / ER nurse, until technology or mild age has rendered me less employable anyway.)

Hmm... I work on rewarding projects and get compensated well, lead a lot of folks (both as VP and as tech. architect), and I am not stressed... And I do not play do these "promotion dances". I do take credit for my work and I give credit to others where credit is due.

I have also observed the obvious opportunists being found out and being managed out or at least not promoted - perhaps they were just bad at it and didn't move quickly enough.

In any case, if that would truly be the price for getting promoted, then I think that price seems to high. The author is either confused or worked at the wrong places.

I’m surprised I did not see a discussion of whether such behavior can be considered unethical. In my own simplified view, there is a dishonesty in the behavior described. Building strategies in pursuit of self-interest rather than developing a product, helping people grow their skills, and, as someone in the comments mentioned, doing it all without saying it.. feels unethical to me. I personally find a lot of solace in the fact that unethical people live in fear of having their positions be compromised or attacked. Is the money trade-off worth it, this fearful, insecure life?

Bite off more than you can chew...

...and then chew it.

> If you screwed up a project, switched roles, and it's only now apparent that the project is in trouble, the blame will naturally fall on its current leader, not on you.

And if it happens to you, just blame the last person! It's a win-win for everyone except the company. These people can play hot potato until the entire company is sunk.

I don't have much else to add to this article. It's pretty perfect. There's a lot more wisdom in here than the title lets on.

The author is to Engineers what Machiavelli is to Princes.

Corporations are little fifedoms. If you can imagine how the court of a old monarch worked, you'll understand the system in place here.

Cynical, and I disagree. If you’re somewhere that prizes appearance over results—which I’ve never seen—then change jobs.

I was promoted from engineer to manager. How did I do it? Started doing more of the work my boss did like client management and fundraising. The organization recognized the more senior contribution and promoted me.

I'd like to remind people the writing of the article.

It's quite a convincing and vivid depiction that I see most engineers lacking. Quite comprehensible, and yet still full of concrete details that plagues a lot of non-technical writing.

Knowledge might be power, but the writing is the tool to project that power!

Thanks for this link. There are a lot of things in there that I _know_ to be true, but find really hard to live out.

I need a reminder every now and then to ensure I don't get stuck in the same shitty job answering to people who are going to be younger and less experienced than myself.

The reason I got into tech was to minimize or avoid this because I figured I would be around people who were passionate about tech and like building things.... but I'm starting to realize that it's possibly the worst in tech of all.

This is awesome- only 2 points I'd counter

* In my experience OKRs genuinely are a ritualistic bullshit dance

* "tech debt" is terrible vocabulary but throwing out the rules to prototype things is critical if you expect to make something that is actually new

I am happy that my career doesn’t depend on promotions. Convincing people “I deserve a promotion” is often tangential to actually generating value for a business, solving real problems.

This isn't necessarily advice meant to be followed (I hope), I think this is meant to give the rest of us an idea of why we fail even though we are trying to do the right thing.

One trick to catch opportunists: start with those looking to increase their headcount faster than baseline (as any good opportunist will attempt), and then see if they will adopt an opposing logical argument as long as it leads to the conclusion that their headcount should grow.

This is a flavor of looking for those who make different arguments depending on the audience, which in general is a helpful warning signal.

Although it's impossible to entirely route out opportunists at a high quality, quickly growing company, as the author notes, I still find it is worthwhile to maximize the number of leaders in your company whom you trust to make arguments in the service of making the business work.

I've got to wonder what the equilibrium result is when this has almost 400 upvotes. Obviously this sort of zero-sum strategy only works when most people are unaware of it.

Most of Finance IT is basically this except worse a lot of times. The only factor that I've seen make a real difference is a good boss but those are pretty hard to get.

I love cynical writings like this as they help me see the world more clearly. By being aware of this kind of attitude I am free to make my own decisions

Great article. Like every good piece of satire, the lines between what happens in real life and the parts that the author exaggerates is blurry.

The Author seems to be an accomplished tech guy. Doesn't this make the author look pessimistic ? What good does this do for the author ?

This is really depressing. How do we stop this cynical game ? is they example of successful companies promoting the right people ?

People who aren't successful tend to convince themselves that people who are successful got there by underhanded means.

> In summary, an opportunist's career advice is: ignore OKRs, switch projects well before the consequences of your decisions can be measured, act happy and easy-going, package bad news as appeals for slow systemic adjustments, don't make anyone look bad, perform rituals with enthusiasm, grow headcount faster than baseline, let work invent itself, follow management fashions, avoid acute failures, believe this sincerely.

What is the source of this ridiculous anti-capitalist rant?

> Marx thought that to be fulfilled, humans must feel a connection to the end result of their work

Of course, the author is a marxist!

Damn, Slava's gotten pretty burned! Let us reminisce about the good old days noodling around with Weblocks.

Replace "Promoted" with "Elected" and you have the US political system.

wow that botanist analogy was spot on for me as bio major who transitioned into tech and startups.

Good tips!

Ah, an Il Principe for the 21st century.

(That's critique presented as satire in the form of advice genuine advice. Author sounds like a Marxist, and Machievlli was a republican, tortured by the incoming Medici.)

Tldr; authenticity vs opportunism

By far the easiest way to get promoted (beyond very junior levels) is by changing jobs every 2 years. And by "changing jobs" I do not mean changing jobs within the same company. I mean changing them for real. That way employers have to compete. If they already have you, there's very little incentive to give you more money or responsibility.

quit your job

Ooph, and here I was hoping it was going to be something that I've lately found: "Get under the right manager and manager's manager." But now I see it's a bit more cynical and ... well ... real. :(

> So your job isn't to make good decisions to improve company metrics. It's to look good. That means you must understand basic tenets of human nature and learn to manipulate them.

This feels like the real tl;dr. Anyone who has worked at multiple dysfunctional companies will probably know this though. Applies for IC and management tracks AFAICT.

> The work will invent itself. Your job isn't the work— it's to grow headcount and make it appear well-managed. That latter part is nearly entirely performative.

Ugh. Kill me, man, I just got back from my two week vacation. I formulated this recently as I started being quite cynical with a peer over the phone - and we just realized the fact we can't figure out what the hell management is doing is exactly their goal. And then it kinda clicked once you realized they were acting in bad faith as nothing made sense with good faith intentions. Growth for sake of getting large promotions. In the sense of a startup - you can have some title but what matters is how many people are under you. So, they are trying to explode the amount so that when they do leave - they will get a larger compensation package at the next place because they can say they managed X people.

1.Find someone good at their job 2. Be good are you job 3. Get promoted

Didn't have time to read the article yet. But here's my quick thought about the topic. Assuming you're a valued employee (not necessarily top 10%, just good enough that the company wouldn't want to lose you) the best way to get promoted is to optimize for it. That means not being shy about it and raising it during 1:1 with your manager on a regular basis. Then if your manager is not helping you getting the promotion or if they cannot come up with a reasonable plan, immediately start looking for a new team/job. Don't threat to leave but let them understand you're a flight risk. If it doesn't happen the right way then it'd happen once you have an offer. Then you can chose. But never tell your employer you have an external offer if you're not OK accepting it if needed.